261–270 of 273 posts
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and... is that the author: http://www.lisabloom.com/ ? Isn't she pretty?
Her web site features her looks more than her books. (In case it changes : 80% of the space is occupied by a photo of hers, and 20% by textual content). Do as I say, not as I do.
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In other words, you missed the point entirely: this is more continued evidence-free speculation, complete with hand-wave theorization that there has been a gender-based task division matching the dominant Western religious-driven socialization for hundreds of thousands of years when we have no data for more than a small percentage of that period and considerable evidence that the proposed specialization wasn't global…
>In other words, you missed the point entirely: this is more continued evidence-free speculation, Actually it's not evidence-free, it is a simple application of evolutionary theory. The "point" of the OP's post, as he stated directly, was that there was no "evidence" supporting the theory that observed gender difference are biologically caused. Pointing out that different brain structures between male and females mea…
Regarding my point on high-level differences: "high-level" simply means anything using more than a simple circuit - walking is a high-level activity and talking is an extraordinarily high one because you have everything from motor control to language and abstract thought driving it. Any high-level activity is based on low-level functions, yes, but there are always multiple strategies to solve problems and the brain is notoriously adaptable (this is how e.g. congenitally blind people end up using the visual cortex for other tasks)
You've reduced your timeframe by an order of magnitude but are still clinging to this hunter/gatherer gender divide which is unsupported by evidence. This Disney history, not anthropology. There is considerable evidence that gender divides were less pronounced prior to the rise of agriculture - and that almost nobody got the majority of their calories from hunting; certainly many women hunted and fished as well - it's almost never about pure brute force (a better tracker is going to trump a muscular lummox every time).
Finally, remember how MRI works: it tells you where millions of neurons were using oxygen in the recent past. It doesn't tell you why, distinguish between the highly specified types of neurons, or allow you to see patterns in behavior. It's still a useful tool but you should think of it like comparing programs by dividing a CPU in quadrants and measuring the average heat in each area after running the programs for awhile.
Finally: you still ascribe purpose to evolution. If something didn't kill you before you reproduce, there's little pressure to remove it. Arthritis is common but hardly selected for.
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>Hang on, did anyone propose affirmative action here or something? All the blog talked about was trying to praise girls for their smarts rather than their looks. If this is enough to cause misery for you, I think you have self-esteem issues. As the pool of eligible husbands diminishes, the pool of men who simply can't get a wife grows and the disparity between the lucky and unlucky men increases. I'm sure you can see…
Wait, are you saying that we need to encourage women to be less capable because the career market is zero sum, and men need careers more than women? I'm very open to the idea that I misunderstood your statement, but if I have characterized it correctly, then the flaw in it is that careers are not zero sum, and having additional capable, productive people in a society creates more wealth for the society as a whole tha…
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Consider the following: In order to look how fashion advertisers tell them they should look, women have to have extraordinarily low body fat. In order to look how fashion advertisers tell them they should look, men have to have extraordinarily low body fat... and high muscle mass. If you know anything about body building you'll know that the second is extremely hard to do. Building muscle mass while at the same time…
You should pay more attention. Most middle age men on tv are fat. Zero middle age women on tv are fat. Super models aren't the role model. Raymond is.
Look at action movies. Those are the roll models of men. Look at advertisements targeted towards men. Those are the roll models of men.
Of course as memory serves, the female lead of Everyone Loves Raymond is actually more out of shape than Raymond himself... But hell, how about the most popular woman on television? Oprah isn't exactly trim.
"What's wrong with wanting to be hot rather than smart? Not everyone can be intelligent, and both beauty and intelligence are natural, requiring no work."
Priceless!
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Lots of assumptions have changed. Here are some assumptions that have changed: "No women can do maths or science". "Women do not want to do very complicated scientific research". "Women are unable to fight in a military and will get very scared and turn into bubbering heaps the first sign of danger". "Women cannot be CEOs because they will just quit as soon as they have a baby". "A woman's life can be fulfilled by ra…
> "A woman's life can be fulfilled by raising children & home making" This feels like a cheap shot from old-school feminists. That assumption hasn't changed, it's just not the only option. A woman's life can be fulfilled by taking care of a family.
To all the people in this thread who seem so absolutely sure that the gender differences are strictly biological, do you fancy telling us what exactly makes you so sure? Last time I checked there was no evidence to support this idea. Obviously there are easily observed physiological differences in brain structure and in the endocrine system etc, however it is a massive leap to go from that to asserting that observed…
> our social/political/economic hegemony. Hm, sorry, what hegemony are you talking about? I always wonder why people who go all excited about gender issues can't accept that women are not men and do not have to be like men? Your 'hegemony' (I assume you speak the well known thesis about male-dominated society) may not actually exist, and the 5 year old's desire to look attractive may not be bad at at all. Imagine, th…
>But still, it is normal for the girls to try to look beautiful, just as it is normal for the boys to try to be strong.
Is it really "normal" when it's something you admit is conditioned of her to some extent by society. There's only so much that can be attributed to natural biological tendencies. Is it really that women are naturally not interested in the "masculine" dimensions of life or are there predetermined boxes that are masculine and predetermined boxes that are feminine in which society subtly puts people?
Women may not even realize they've been conditioned to fit into these boxes and so they're okay with it. That doesn't mean we should continue to perpetuate it. Some women may have been perfectly okay not being able to vote but that doesn't mean we continue to prevent them from voting. The point is the choice to do or do not. When you're perpetuating subtle societal gender expectations, you're preventing women the choice to venture out of the feminine box.
The amount of ignorance and misogyny in here is staggering. Have any of you ever actually talked to a woman? I'll boil down the argument into one that favors women: Men are biologically programmed to be violent. We should find it as no surprise that the vast majority of violent criminals are men. After all, it's their biology. And thus all men should be regarded as likely violent in the right circumstances. Also we s…
Most of the people on here are debating the degree that gender affects life choices and goals (obviously it does to some degree). It's not misogyny to debate the differences between men and women. No one is advocating that women should be categorically denied access to certain societal roles. If I said: "Because of X, Y, & Z it's possible that biology has had more effect on female career choices than the 'patriarchy'…
The problem is de facto oppression of women based on some idea that their biology makes them want to be stupid.
Therefore since it's their biology we should expect and indeed encourage the "normal" path of limiting life accomplishments to child-rearing?
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>In other words, you missed the point entirely: this is more continued evidence-free speculation, Actually it's not evidence-free, it is a simple application of evolutionary theory. The "point" of the OP's post, as he stated directly, was that there was no "evidence" supporting the theory that observed gender difference are biologically caused. Pointing out that different brain structures between male and females mea…
I realize evolutionary psychology is exciting but it's also very dubious as science because it isn't predictive or falsifiable in most cases. This speculation is what you're calling "application of theory". If you want to claim scientific credibility, do some actual neuroscience with a testable experiment producing hard data quantifying the exact degree to which differences in the size of certain structures is herita…
All you're doing is dismissing an argument by dismissing an entire field of science. There is no scientific consensus that evolutionary psychology is "very dubious", and EP is widely respected as field in the scientific community precisely because it can be a powerful tool in making deductions about humans where other types of experiments might not be possible. There is no good science in dismissing it, and any argument against it must be won it's merits, not against the very idea of EP.
> This is a lot harder than ret-conning sexism on the Internet
"ret-conning"? Do you mean retroactive continuity? In what way does that apply to anything I wrote? Is that an accusation of sexism on the part of an argument that advocates the possibility of innate gender differences?
> Regarding my point on high-level differences: "high-level" simply means anything using more than a simple circuit
Is that the consensus of "high-level"? How many layers of abstraction exactly is it that qualifies as high-level? In addition, if you are to assert that high level human behavior is based on low-level brain activity, but the brain is "notoriously adaptable" and therefore high level brain functionality is independent of low-level functionality to some degree, you contradict your earlier argument that that type of speculation is unscientific. Scientific knowledge of the relationship between high-level functionality as derived from low-level functionality is paltry.
> (a better tracker is going to trump a muscular lummox every time)
But that's not a controlled comparison. Why compare someone who is smarter and of ambiguous strength with someone who is strong and dumb? All else being equal, more muscular strength is of enormous use when you are either hunting game, building traps, or fishing. And since there is a high cost to maintaining muscle mass in terms of energy needs, there simply must be some advantage and some reason in terms of behavior why men are statistically more muscular than women.
> This Disney history, not anthropology.
I actually expected a response like this. I'm using "males go hunting" and "females tend to the family at home" imagery so it must be a cartoonish simplification, right?. And yet, that is a scientifically common and respected belief about how at least some pre-history humans lived (especially given that there simply aren't many other options.) There are of course other survival blueprints of pre-history humans, such as fishing or lucking out and having more than enough to forage for main sustenance, but the general concept still applies: women's bodies are more adapted to caring for infants or children, and men for physical labor (Assuming intelligence benefits both jobs equally). So whether its hunting, fishing, construction, or even farming, it is unavoidably more efficient for men to do one and women the other. The physical difference between men and women is also a huge clue that men and women have actually been doing these specialized tasks for almost our entire evolutionary history, and that that's why these differences exist in the first place. And of course, males and females can switch roles if it's beneficial, but there's still the general tendency.
> You've reduced your timeframe by an order of magnitude but are still clinging to this hunter/gatherer gender divide which is unsupported by evidence.
The time-frame was not changed. First, our actual timeline of when most humans became agricultural is a bit sketchy. Second, "tens of thousands of years ago" easily includes time periods far back enough that we are at a point where there was still no widespread agricultural activity. As does "hundreds of thousands of years ago". The two overlap. No change of time-frames.
> Finally, remember how MRI works: it tells you where millions of neurons were using oxygen in the recent past. It doesn't tell you why...
Actually, that's really not how it works, what you're describing sounds more like an fMRI. But in any case you are still missing the point. My argument is that brain physiology features common to women but not men necessarily means innate gender differences. Otherwise there would be no consistent selection for those features. If there was no benefit to those features, they either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be common to only one gender. If they are selected for, that ultimately means they have benefit to human survival, and can impact either high-level or low-level behavior (there's no reason why the evolutionary process could select for one but not the other, and after all, that would be ascribing purpose to evolution.)
> Finally: you still ascribe purpose to evolution. If something didn't kill you before you reproduce, there's little pressure to remove it. Arthritis is common but hardly selected for.
There is enormous pressure, it's not like parents don't provide benefits to their children after they are born, or even after their children are grown and have their own children. It's simply a support network. Not that that has anything to do with the accusation that I ascribe purpose to evolution, of which you provided no evidence.
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Wait, are you saying that we need to encourage women to be less capable because the career market is zero sum, and men need careers more than women? I'm very open to the idea that I misunderstood your statement, but if I have characterized it correctly, then the flaw in it is that careers are not zero sum, and having additional capable, productive people in a society creates more wealth for the society as a whole tha…
I certainly believe that marriages can be more harmonious when the men is in a economically leading role. Do I believe that women should suppressed in order to achieve this? No. Do I believe that if a woman wants a successful marriage, pursuing a high-status career can be harmful to this? Yes.
Which I guess is my way of saying that any particular marriage happens between two individuals with their own strengths, weakenesses, and interests, not between two archtypes or statistical distributions. A successful marriage is only possible between two happy partners, and if a person will be unhappy without pursuing their other life goals along with their marriage, giving those life goals up for the sake of the marriage is still a losing strategy.
Personally, I think overgeneralization from the statistical majority is one of the signal problems of trying to talk about gender rules and guidelines -- though, admittedly, the opposite problem is nearly as common, which is refusing to acknowledge that there are such things as common tendencies and statistical majorities.